Zoom Player MAX 19.5

What's new in this version:

IPTV Xtream Codes support:
- Zoom Player supports three different Xtream Codes modes to access the stream playlist and EPG (electronic program guide) information. The modes exist to offer a fallback solution in case your IPTV provider is only offering partial support for Xtream Codes' feature-set

Player API:
- This is the most recent Xtream Codes API. It uses network queries to obtain both the Stream Playlists and EPG data. TV Series and Movies are handled separately from live streams, providing an enhanced navigation experience. However, the EPG information is only accessible on a per-stream level and not as a whole, preventing the Global Filtering and EPG Grid features from working

Player API + XML (default):
- By leveraging the Player API you still benefit from the separate handling of TV Series and Movies. With the entire EPG downloaded as a single XML file, the Global Filtering and EPG Grid features have access to the full program guide and can work as intended

M3U + XML:
- This is the most basic mode with both the EPG and the stream playlists downloaded as single-file databases. Global Filtering and the EPG Grid features work as intended, however TV Series and Movies are left to the graces of your IPTV provider, which means they may be harder to access and usually lack EPG or Meta-Data information (e.g. Bitrate). New IPTV Electronic Program Guide Grid. The EPG grid is an alternative program guide view that lists the episode guide of multiple streams in an easy to scroll and filter interface. You can access the EPG grid by pressing the "#" button within the IPTV window. The EPG grid does not rely on the stream list and can be used without specifying any stream sources. The EPG grid's look and feel can be fully customized by pressing the menu button and choosing "Customize". You can use this same menu to "Magnetize" the EPG Grid window to the IPTV window. New IPTV global episode guide filter. The new global filter works across all streams, filtering out streams that do not contain a program title containing the filter text
- Global filtering is very useful when searching for a particular program or live event across all available streams
- Please note that performing the initial global search triggers a one time stream indexing operation that may up to a few minutes on some hardware
- Added support for H.266/VVC, AV1 and Opus detection and icons to the media library

New IPTV menu button on the IPTV window. The new menu includes:
- 1. Only show favorites (new feature, hides all other streams)
- 2. Toggle Opacity (previously a button)
- 3. IPTV Settings (previously a button)
- Added a new setting (Adv. Options / System / Screen Saver & Capture) that allows you to specify if screenshots should be saved in the same folder as the video currently being played (Only applies to local files)
- Added a new setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Video / Aspect Ratio) to reset the aspect ratio to "Derived" when opening a new media disabled by default)
- Added a new setting (Adv. Options / Playback / History) to automatically restore the previously active video aspect ratio on replay (disabled by default). This new feature will only work for videos that was previously played by this version of Zoom Player (or newer) since previous versions did not save the active aspect ratio
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) to sort the Group list by name
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Naviation / Settings) to prevent the fullscreen playlist and streaming navigation interface
- from closing when playing a new file
- New Settings to seek forward/backward a percentage of the media's duration. Te default seek distance is 10% of the media's duration but you can change this value under "Adv. Options / Playback / Controls"
- By default, the two new functions are assigned to the Ctrl+Alt+"[" and Ctrl+Alt+"]" keyboard shortcuts
- New Settings to seek forward/backward a percentage of the media's duration when right-clicking the timeline. The default action is still seeking in seconds, you can change this to percent under - "Adv. Options / Interface / Mouse / Settings"
- Added settings to control which Zoom Player function is triggered when using the mouse wheel while holding either the Alt, Ctrl or Shift keys

The default values are:
- Mouse Wheel + Alt : Seek 5 seconds backwards/forward
- Mouse Wheel + Ctrl : Seek 20 seconds backwards/forward
- Mouse Wheel + Shift : Seek 120 seconds backwards/forward
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) to control whether global EPG filtering includes filtering using the program's description
- This setting can slow down filtering and is disabled by default
- New "Copy path to clipboard" item on the playlist editor's right-click menu. This feature allows you to copy the file or URL path of the selected media entry in the playlist editor
- IPTV Per-EPG Time Shift support (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) has been added. The time shift is applied to the entire EPG

Please note:
- If you previously set a time shift on a specific stream then both time shifts are combined
- In cases where you list an IPTV stream supporting archive playback but the stream does not have an Episode Guide or the Episode Guide does not cover the full archive period specified in the playlist, Zoom Player now creates empty entries on the EPG listing panels to enable archive playback covering the full archive period
- IPTV playback of streams that require authentication using user-agent or referrer are now supported. For compatibility, Zoom Player uses the same "#EXTVLCOPT" playlist tag as VLC. This feature requires a version of LAV Filters newer than 0.79.2 as it was introduced by LAV Filters in a nightly build released after v0.79.2
- Rewrote some of the IPTV stream listing code to work much faster when dealing with massive stream lists
- I used a test file containing an outrageous 572,527 playlist entries in a 142mb file. I managed to reduce filtering time from 24.4 seconds all the way down to 1.3 seconds or 1877% faster compared to the previous version
- Added an IPTV stream "filtered / count" label to the IPTV window
- Adding an IPTV Playlist or EPG download link will now automatically suggest a profile name based on the base URL
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) that determines whether clicking on an IPTV group snaps the group to the top of the list, displaying the maximum number of items on-screen. Enabled by default
- Added an "Export Playlist to M3U" feature to the playlist editor's right- click context menu
- Closing Zoom Player with less than 1GB of free space on the "C:" drive now shows a warning message. Under some conditions, low disk space can corrup
- Zoom Player's settings and we don't want that
- If the message is annoying, disable it under "Adv. Options / System"
- Some of the IPTV customization options have moved to an interactive dialog that can be opened from the IPTV window and allows you to view any changes you make in real time
- The media library now shows the media's duration in list view mode when a duration is available
- Cleaned up the Advanced Options dialog's Video Aspect Ratio section
- Cleaned up the Advanced Options dialog's Mouse Wheel section
- Redesigned the chapter/bookmark editor to make it cleaner and easier to use
- Enhanced the IPTV playlist parsing code to be more tolerant of badly authored playlists
- Optimized several parsing functions, Zoom Player should now load a little quicker
- You can now edit the IPTV's Playlist/EPG URL value without having to first remove the existing listing
- Unassigned (to a group) IPTV playlist entries are now listed on the bottom and not semi-randomly (where the first unassigned entry was spotting in the playlist)
- Zoom Player no longer asks you if you would like to add the free IPTV channels if you already configured your own IPTV subscription service
- Clicking on a playlist entry in the playlist editor window when search is active, now removes the keyboard focus from the search box. The search value is not reset in this case, just hidden until you click the search box again
- Changed the title of the IPTV interface on the right-click context menu from "IPTV Electronic Program Guide" to "IPTV Player"
- Some of the IPTV window's buttons have moved under a Menu button to make room for new features
- The Media Library's YouTube Playlist plugin can now be used to "Refresh" the thumbnail and playlist name under the media library editor's configuration page
- For clarity, the IPTV Window's "Play Stream" button is now disabled in cases where streams can't be played based on the currently selected entry
- The scene-cut dialog now closes when closing the playing media and will not open unless a media is playing with a duration longer than "0"
- The "Reset user interface windows" function now applies to the IPTV player window and EPG Grid window
- Refreshed the content of the keyboard help dialog (F1 keyboard shortcut) for clarity
- The options dialog's Search feature now tries to screen-center the searched feature when clicked
- You can now select and delete multiple media library categories in the media library category editor using a single action
- You can now use the "Delete" key in the media library category editor to delete (with confirmation) the selected categories
- Added a right-click menu to the media library category editor's category list to make the features more accessible
- Small tweaks to the Media Library Category Editor layout to improve the user experience
- Added "VTT" to the default subtitle extensions (Adv. Options / Fil
- Format Association / File Extensions). You need to press the "Default" button on this page to apply this change on existing installations
- Added the ".RA" extension to Smart Play's real audio source profile
- The "Reset Color settings" keyboard shortcut has been changed from "F11" to "Ctrl+F11"
- The "Apply Color settings" keyboard shortcut has been changed from "F12" to "Ctrl+F12"
- Playing new media from the Playlist Editor, IPTV windows, Advance
- Playlist Control and the Station Manager should no longer cause the main player window to appear on top for a short duration while the media is loading
- Incorrectly setting the Hot-Corner action in the advanced options dialog could cause Zoom Player's settings to get partially reset
- Due to an encoding bug, favorite IPTV stream names containing special characters got progressively more corrupted with "&pipe", ""e", "&" and other HTML character encoding garbage
- Parsing "M3U" playlist containing URLs ignored the listed duration
- Any interface SFX played while a media was loaded using the DirectShow media engine would break volume control until a new media was loaded. "SOON" and "LIVE" media library YouTube entries would disappear when pressing the "Load More" option and then closing and reopening the media library
- Fixed a UTF8 encoding/decoding bug that failed to decode unicode characters greater than U+010000 in the TCP/IP control API, causing Zoom Player to not find files with these characters in the name
- Loading a Zoom Player chapter file (".zpchp") did not sort the chapters by position, instead showing them by the order they were listed in the file
- Fixed a bug that prevented the source video resolution from being read when using MPC-VR as the video renderer
- Fixed a bug that prevented text input on the "Folder/Poster file mask" and "Backdrop file mask" settings (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen / Navigation / Customization)
- Fixed a bug where IPTV stream's time-shift offset was not being saved correctly if the stream only had a name and not an ID
- The media library category editor should now restore the previously selected category when closing and re-opening the dialog
- Using the media library's "resume playback" feature did not add the media's title (when available) to the playlist
- Fixed a bug that could cause Zoom Player to freeze on exit when a new IPTV playlist/EPG download has finished with no disk space to extract it
- Pressing "Play" from the control bar when using the libVLC engine for playback could cause the control bar to appear hidden behind the video, preventing access until the control bar was closed and reopened
- Fixed a small cosmetic glitch when resizing the IPTV program information dialog
- Fixed a cosmetic bug that caused the wrong icons to appear in the playlist fullscreen navigation interface if safe mode was enabled
- Fixed a cosmetic bug that didn't update the playing media's duration in real time if the playlist had another duplicate entry listed earlier
- The Media Library RSS feed plugin showed duplicate entries if the server switched from "https://" URLs to "http://" URLs. This fix does not resolve the issue if bad entries were already cached, to resolve that you have to erase the ".rss" file from Zoom Player's "CategoryCacheRSS_Feed" folder
- The Media Library RSS feed plugin did not show the "Refresh" option
- Some dialogs on the skin selection dialog were not showing translated OK/Cancel buttons
- When using really massive IPTV playlists that can take a few seconds to parse or filter, Windows would detect Zoom Player's window as unresponsive and when Zoom Player completed the action and became responsive again, Windows would bring the main player window to the front automatically
- Now Zoom Player restores the IPTV window to the top as soon as such long actions are complete
- You can no longer right-click to hide your IPTV's "Favorites" from the stream list
- When picking a local IPTV playlist or EPG file and changing the dialog to search for "all files", no files were shown
- Fixed a rare case where the playlist editor was not able to read an M3U playlist entry's title
- You can no longer use a duplicate or empty profile name when adding or renaming IPTV sources
- On rare occasions using the Edge Webview2 engine to playback YouTube content resulted in the video's duration remaining at zero, causing Zoom Player's internal screen saver to kick-in. I wrote a fix, but it is untested as this issue is somewhat rare, let me know if you encounter it after this fix
- Fixed a glitch with the default skins that caused the title text to appear behind the minimize button in audio mode
- Setting the Scene Cut editor to "Pause Playback" did not update the user interface correctly
- Using ".df" definition files to save/restore a subtitle synchronization offset was broken in v19 when I added support for the libVLC media engine
- Using a custom menu "Execute" feature did not work if the playing file had space characters in the file name
- You can no longer "favorite" the same IPTV stream more than once
- Clicking on "Favorite" IPTV streams did not show their EPG information or showed an EPG information from a different stream
- Right-clicking the IPTV Stream List panel did not update the EPG listing
- The scene-cut information was not cleared when closing the playing media
- The scene-cut "GoTo" button was incorrectly enabled for some cut modes
- An IPTV's program description did not show line breaks correctly in the EPG list
- Switching an audio or subtitle track while the Home Theater Strea
- Selection interface was open did not update the listed entries to reflect the new track selection
- Media Library thumbnails with a title longer than the available space to display the text were not vertically centered correctly